I wasn't always like this. I used to be normal.

Up until the beginning of ninth grade, I was a twig. A kid's metabolism, I guess--I could eat and eat and eat whatever the heck I wanted, and I still looked malnourished. Then puberty started sneaking up on me when I turned twelve, and I gradually got rounder. By the beginning of high school, I was what you could probably call "chubby." I didn't notice right away, not until close to the end of the year when my grandmother made a comment to my mother that I was getting "a bit heavy."

I didn't really care right away. I had the most amazing rack ever (popping out of a C cup) and got lots of attention from boys, which makes all the difference when you're 14 and 15. Then, when we went to visit family over Christmas, my mother noticed that my cousin (who is the same age as I am) was a stick, which made me look like an elephant by comparison. Mommie dearest used to "diet" like I do, and she definitely didn't want a fattie for a daughter, so she started commenting on my weight. The commenting turned to her straight up telling me I was fat and needed to drop like 50 pounds.

So at age 15, for the first time ever, I weighed myself: 135 pounds. I tried eating less, but I couldn't resist all the snacks my idiot mother insisted on buying at the grocery store even though she said I shouldn't eat any of them. I was a teenager who hated sports, so I couldn't really exercise either. I tried jogging outside after school, but that got old real fast. By the time I hit 16, I figured that the only way for me to get thin was to stop eating altogether. Lo and behold, this diet worked.

And I became an addict.

Today, I ate: 1 bowl cereal measured (160), 1 cup coffee with half & half (25), 1 South Beach fiber bar (110), 3 Cadbury mini eggs (50), 1 Lean Cuisine (210), and 1 cup low-calorie Swiss Miss (25), for a Total of 580. I didn't exercise because my boss kept me at work really late, so this was definitely a Bad Day. I am a FAT PIG.

I think I'm going to faint.

This is the worst thing to try and fight. For whatever reason, on this particular day at around 10.45 in the morning, I started to get the Hunger Jitters. It starts as a general weakness in the arms and legs, and then spreads to the point where just getting up to go bring the mail in to my boss feels like I’m trying to run a ten-mile marathon. Then my hands start to feel shaky. There’s a hollowness in my lower chest spreading into my stomach, where I can actually feel how empty it is. My heart feels like it’s racing, and my breathing is uneven and getting faster. If I stand up at a normal speed—not even too fast—everything starts to turn black, and I can hear a rushing noise like waves in my ears.

It’s like Emily says in The Devil Wears Prada, about her new diet—basically she doesn’t eat anything, and whenever she feels like she’s about to faint, she just eats a cube of cheese. I do something similar: Diet Pepsi can help with the Hunger Jitters. It tricks your body into thinking it’s getting a sweet snack, but since there aren’t any actual calories in it, you’re not actually consuming anything.